viewed June 30, 2000 at UA Colma  Full Details

One's enjoyment of this film largely depends on suspension of disbelief -- if one overlooks the bumper crop of cliches taken from the textbook of Disaster Movies 101 and Sailor Movie Scriptwriting, then there is much enjoyment to be had in the heart-stopping special effects.  

The gang is all there: the scientist type, in this case a lowly TV weathercaster, who foresees the grand calamity.  The rescuers who end up needing to be rescued.  The grizzled old man slouched at the end of the bar, who when hearing that the fisherman heroes have sailed out halfway across the Atlantic to a spot called Flemish Cap, mutters, "Flemish Cap.  I sailed out there once in 1962.  A lot of fish.  A lot of weather."  By the time a shark launched out of nowhere to crash onto the boat's deck, I felt the textbook plagiarism had gone too far.

And of course he's right on the dot, and the audience starts to anticipate what lies ahead.  Unfortunately the film is half over by this point.  I've heard a lot of praise for this film from those who have been caught up in the swell of the action that surges through the second half of the film -- but my suspension of disbelief and willingness to sit back and be entertained already been spoiled by the first half where the life of fishermen is romanticized beyond all recognition and exposition is laid out, painfully and perfunctorily.  Sea dog sailors who smell of fish and beer, trying to court the harbor ladies however fat or small to the rooms upstairs to the bar.  Then there's the divorcee who misses his kid, the young fiance who's eager to start a family if only he had the means, and the bachelor skipper for life who needs one good score to break out of his slump -- they're played respecitvely by John C. Reilly, Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney, three of the most interesting actors of the moment.  Reilly wades through a shallow role that leads to nothing, while Wahlberg and Clooney pretty much carry over the same respective personalities they played in Three Kings, the kid trying to get back to his loved one, following the captain trying to do right one last time. 

However static, the strength of Wahlberg and Clooney's personalities keeps their heads bobbing above the overwhelming visual effects.  It seems that director Wolfgang Petersen has developed his own action film aesthetic: creating scenarios that are utterly implausible.  In one sequence Reilly's hand is caught by a fishing hook and he is dragged thousands of meters in the sea before two fishermen jump after him and somehow rescue both him and themselves.  I was reminded of the improbable sight of Harrison Ford as the President in Air Force One being dragged behind a jet plane thousands of feet in the air.  Another stunt involves Clooney climbing to the top of a teetering mast with a blowtorch to detach a dangerously swinging anchor in the middle of a hurricane: how likely in all that turbulence would Clooney not lose control of the torch and burn himself?  They might be sights to marvel at, but a lot of people won't buy them for a minute.  

Worst of all is a painful excuse for a eulogy at the end.  Without spoiling the ending, I'll say that the movie stayed true to what actually happened, though it doesn't seem that the filmmakers knew what to do with this ending.  So we get a treacly speech in an enormous cathedral and a bewildered response from everyone around me.  I swear, half of the audience in my screening were bawling their eyes out, the other half was laughing hysterically, and I think there was another half doing both.  I was just looking around in amazement of this phenomenon.  The worst scene in the film was the best moment I witnessed all evening.

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